stop it! Focus or die, you can't have both.īeneath the sweaty face mask, Noguchi gritted her teeth, silently cursing her wounded pride. Didn't matter that she bore Broken Tusk's mark and was still Hunting from the least honorable position. It didn't matter that she was in the back, or in the middle of the back, the worst position from which to score a kill. At one time, the sounds and smells had excited her, too, but today it only made her wonder again if this was where she wanted to be. The heat from their suits combined with the thick, oily musk they secreted, created a humid, feral atmosphere alive with the clicking growls of barely checked excitement. The suits had individual thermostats, but even at the low end they were well over human comfort levels, and since the unnamed planet was cold by Hunter standards, the others had theirs cranked up. She felt overheated and irritated, crowded by the towering young males all around her. Noguchi shook herself mentally, working to slide into the focus she would need, to concentrate her energy-but it wouldn't come. It wasn't a new thought, but it still stung. It was a cloving.Īnimal smell, and the heat made her feel like she was bathing in it. Dia-shui, they called it, along with a clicking that she couldn't pronounce.

Noguchi tried to breathe evenly, wishing that the masks had a better filter system it was hot, dark, and she couldn't get away from Hunter musk. Flashes of glistening black darted across the screen, raising the level of greedy anticipation in the stuffy, overwarm air. They waited for the signal in the main loading dock, the planet's ugly surface displayed on a small screen set into the door. After so many training Hunts that I could teach them myself. It looked like gaseous piss, and even with the steady pump of adrenaline coursing through her, the intensity that came from knowing she was about to face death, she found herself wondering if it was worth it anymore. They set down just after dawn, or whatever passed for it on the unnamed planet the dirty light from two distant stars lay across the rocky world like smog, an early bath of murky yellow haze that did nothing to improve Noguchi's mood.

Alan dean foster alien vs predator war